Dead Eyes
by Erinya
Summary: To the CIA, Sands is a liability. To the officer sent to Mexico to hunt him down, he's a bad memory. But when both hunter and quarry become targets in a cartel turf war, they must work together to survive. And trust is the hardest lesson to relearn.
1. Chapter One

**Disclaimer**: I like to play with things that don't belong to me.  
**Warnings**: Rating will likely go up. Oh, and it may get a wee bit political, sugarbutt. Can you dig it?  
**Author's Note**: So here's the deal. When plot bunnies attack, you don't argue. Especially when they're gun-toting psychotic Mexican bunnies wearing CIA t-shirts. It's their fault, not mine, that I'm writing a OUATIM OFC fic. However, I very much doubt it will evolve into a romance. Much as one might wish it to be so, Sands does not make a good romantic lead. So this tale will not be about twue wuv, though it may contain sexual situations (most likely in flashback.) Other than that, as is on par with my usual seat-of-the-pants writing style, I only have a vague idea of where this is going to lead. Please let me know if it is worth continuing.  
**Technical Note**: The Spanish is only as correct as four years of high school language classes can make it. Lindsey Moran's highly entertaining _Blowing My Cover _has provided some useful insights into CIA training and culture, including the little-known fact that CIA operatives are designated as Officers, not Agents. (Actually, in the movie El Mariachi was the CIA _agent, _meaning that he was recruited by a CIA case officer, i.e. Sands, to do the Company's dirty work.) But keep in mind that I mostly just pretend I know what I'm talking about.  
**P.S.**: I thought Jack Sparrow's character was hard to capture...Sands presents an even tougher challenge. He's an intimidating bastard. If I screw up on characterization, please tell me so.

Feedback of any kind is always appreciated. Constructive criticism is manna in the writer's wilderness.

* * *

**Dead Eyes**

**Chapter One**

_My life has been empty  
my life has been untrue  
and does she really know  
who I really am?  
does she really know me at last?  
dead eyes, are you just like me?_

The Smashing Pumpkins, "By Starlight"

* * *

_He slept, wandering in a nightmare of pain, of blood and betrayal and darkness. _

He woke, echoes of his own screams raw in his throat, in his ears. But daylight never came. The pain was real. The nightmare went on. The darkness went on.

He tried to shut his eyes against the darkness, but he had no eyes to shut.

No eyes no eyes no eyes...

"Shut up," he muttered savagely. "Just shut up."

He listened, twisting his head restlessly from side to side. The laboring rattle of a geriatric air conditioner effectively shut out everything else; still, he caught faint snatches of street noise under it. The room felt small. The street was at least one story down.

Finally, reluctantly, he called out, hating the weak, rasping sound of his own voice. He lay tense, waiting, but no one answered. He was alone.

After a while, he tried to get up. The movement made his head swim, the pain jolting up several notches from throbbing personal hell to vicious white-hot agony...

He must have passed out, then. When he woke again, someone was there in the room with him.

"Señor?"

The kid, he realized, in a hard-earned moment of lucidity, and stopped himself from groping under the pillow for his gun.

Something blessedly cool touched his lips. It wasn't tequila and lime, just plain water, but he drank it so greedily he almost choked.

"Where the hell am I?" he demanded hoarsely, when he was done coughing.

"Su hotel. Como quisó."

He didn't remember asking to be taken back to his hotel. "I did?"

"Sí. Debe ir al hospital, Señor," the boy whispered. "Llamaré la ambulancia..."

"No!" he snarled. "Don't you even fucking think about it."

"But Señor..."

"No more fucking doctors. Comprendes? I am not going to the hospital." He heard quiet sniffling, and reached out with his good arm to grab the boy's wrist. "Here's what I need you to do..."

* * *

**CIA Headquarters, Washington DC  
November 3rd, 2003**

"Welcome back, Officer Cassidy. Have a seat."

Jules eyed the Chief of Operations warily. "I'll stand, thanks."

"Suit yourself," her boss said. "Enjoying your visit Stateside?"

"Sure, it's been great." It hadn't been; but he wasn't asking because he cared. "Let's cut the crap, Hollister. What is this about?"

Hollister sighed, ran a hand through his thinning sandy hair. "We have a problem."

"What a surprise," she deadpanned. "Cockroaches in the cafeteria again?"

"It's serious matter, Cassidy," he said sharply. "The Agency is very concerned."

"Sorry." _Shit._ She wondered suddenly if she was being called onto the carpet. Maybe someone had made note of her extracurricular activities and considerably unorthodox tactics in Beruit and decided to make an example of her.

_Lie, cheat and steal. Just don't get caught._ The unofficial motto of CIA Ops. And she thought she had made pretty damn sure she wasn't going to get caught. She sat down carefully, keeping her movements nonchalant, her face smooth. Spook training was useful in other places besides the field.

But Hollister said, "You been reading the intel briefs these last couple of weeks? Watching the news?"

"I'm on vacation," she said, relieved. "All I watch is Jeopardy." She still read the briefs, though. In the Company, you never got a real vacation, and you always, always, took your work home with you.

Hollister smiled humorlessly. "You're not on vacation anymore." _Case in point._ He pushed a folded newspaper across the desk to her. "Special Activities officer went rogue down in Mexico, set up a coup that got messy," he said. "You're on clean-up."

"Oh, well. I was getting bored in DC anyway." This, at least, was true. She'd been ready to crawl out of her skin these last few days; yesterday, she'd stalked around her small, barren apartment like a caged panther until she'd realized what she was doing and taken herself to the streets for a grueling two-hour run in the cold November rain. It hadn't helped much. Skimming the article ("Mexican cartel brought down in attempted government takeover") she frowned. "Haven't we been trying to take Barillo out for years now? According to this, someone did a nice clean job of it." Clean being a relative term. A lot of men had died, but they were mostly soldiers. Non-com casualties had been light--for a minor revolution. "What am I missing?"

"The cartel was a target. Just not the only target."

She could see by his face that he wasn't about to reveal any more information about that, not yet. That meant a sensitive objective, an important mark. She probably wouldn't even see the whole file.

Her gaze fell on the picture that accompanied the article. _El Presidente. Who else?_ With his Mexican Nationalist agenda, he wasn't exactly known for his amenability to the economic and foreign policy goals of the current administration. He would certainly be a confidential target. Plausible deniability all the way to the top; U.S. involvement would be tantamount to an act of war, if it ever came to light. But she kept her guesses to herself--even as a spy, it was possible to know too much--and said only, "The job was botched intentionally?"

"We don't know that." Hollister's voice was heavy with frustration. "We lost contact with our man just before it all went to hell. By all indications, he's dead." He dropped a manila folder on top of the newspaper. "The only thing we _do_ know is that he was playing both sides. Unfortunately, our informant also seems to have dropped off the map."

Jules opened the file, glanced up swiftly.

"I know him."

Her boss inclined his head.

"Knew him, that is...We were at the Farm together."

"All of that is in your file, of course." He smiled. "All of it, Officer Cassidy. You were lovers, isn't that right?"

Damn him. She refused to give him the satisfaction of seeing her rattled. "No secrets among spies, huh?"

"Information is our business, Cassidy," Hollister said dryly. "Your history together makes you ideal for this job, you see. Familiarity with the target is always an advantage. But you know that."

She stared at him. "I thought you said he was dead."

"Presumed." Hollister leaned back in his chair, watching her. "Your objective is to tie up any loose ends, so to speak."

She looked down again at the file in her hand. Sheldon Jeffrey Sands smirked up at her from the ID photo, arrogant, hard-faced, beautiful. Height: 5'10". Weight: 160 lbs. Hair: brown. Eyes: brown. But that wasn't accurate; to describe his eyes as brown connoted warmth. Sands' eyes were simply dark.

She had made it her private mission, for awhile, to discover what lay behind that cold, ironic glance. Perhaps she had been naïve to assume that the darkness implied hidden depths, that the biting wit shielded a wounded soul; back then she had glimpsed, or thought she glimpsed, an occasional flicker of light chinking through. But in this photograph, the eyes were flat, dead. The darkness went all the way down.

They'd parted ways with their first real assignments; she didn't know where he had been posted. One didn't carry on long-distance relationships in the Agency, even if they had parted on good terms. Which they hadn't. That had been almost seven years ago; she hadn't really expected to see him again, hadn't wanted to. But...

Gone rogue. _Christ._ Asshole or not, he had been a damn good spy. Ruthless, driven, brilliant. _What happened to you, Shel?_

He had gone black ops too, that much she did know. The job changed you, hardened you. It was inevitable; she saw it herself in the mirror each morning, in the guarded, impassive green eyes that gazed back at her. To make it in CIA Operations, you had to have hardness at your core to begin with; if not, you dropped out of the training program pretty damn quick, because they honed in on your weaknesses there--bad habits like playing fair or playing nice--and pushed you 'til you broke, or broke yourself of the habit of weakness. But in the euphemistically named Special Activities Division you witnessed enough terrible things, orchestrated them yourself more often than not, and you lost whatever innocence and idealism you had left real fast. You learned to stop asking whether the ends justified the means. You learned to forget that the mark you saw in your crosshairs was a person, someone's son or someone's mother. You caused regimes to fall, stood by while whole families were murdered in small, bloody wars; if you were unlucky, you might have to watch a fellow agent die, leave them behind unburied and unsung, to be remembered only as a nameless star etched on a blank wall in HQ.

And if you were very unlucky you might have to take one of them out yourself, someone you had known, trained with, briefed with. Slept with...

"You want me to kill him."

"I hate to put it that way." Hollister looked pained. "But we have reason to believe it may be necessary. Alive and at large, he is, at best, a loose cannon. At worst, a traitor. You understand, of course, what is at stake here, Cassidy. Such a liability must be neutralized."

"I understand, sir."

"I've read your file over very thoroughly, Officer Cassidy. I assume you will have no trouble accomplishing the task that is set to you."

She smiled grimly. "No, sir."

"In fact, it's been said that there is only one SA operative currently in the field who can match you in experience, skill, and audacity." He paused, met her gaze directly; there was a warning there. "That officer's name is Sheldon Jeffrey Sands."


	2. Chapter Two

**Disclaimer:** Robert Rodriguez's Mexico is not mine.

**Author's Note:** In researching for this story, I was startled to discover how much of OUATIM's plot is derived from real life. There was, for instance, a cartel kingpin in Culiacan named Amado Carillo, who died of complications from a botched plastic surgery back in 1997. Interesting, no?

I realize there is not much of Sands in this chapter, so bear with me. Also, I have tried to weave the Spanish words into the dialogue so that they can be understood in context. I hope this is effective and not annoying.

**A Note on Names**: I have taken the liberty of giving Ajedrez Ms. Mendes' first name; it seemed to fit her. However, though "Sheldon Jeffrey Sands" should be by rights only an alias, as its owner actually uses it while on the job in Mexico, I could not bear to rename him.

* * *

Dead Eyes

**Chapter Two**

_America I've given you all and now I'm nothing._

Allen Ginsberg, "America"

* * *

**Hermosillo, Sonora, Mexico  
November 3rd, 2003**

The man in the white suit was not old, in his late twenties or early thirties; he was tall and dark, well-groomed and well-tailored, but his features were just a little too sharp to be handsome. He stood gazing out over the orange orchard that shaded the modest villa, fingering a medallion that bore the image of a saint, though this particular saint had never been beatified by the Holy Roman Catholic Church. The warm late-morning air blowing through the open window was fragrant with citrus and melodic with birdsong.

The door behind him opened and shut; another man entered. He looked like a soldier, despite the fact that he'd been "politely requested" to leave his AK-47 with the beefy guards in the hall. He also looked nervous.

"So. It is true," said the man at the window, without turning around.

"_Sí, comandante._ The president escaped, unharmed."

"_Chingadera,_" cursed the _comandante_. "What of Marquez?"

"Dead."

"He was a fool. His men?"

"_Masacrado._"

"The entire army?" The cultured voice dripped with disbelief. "_El presidente_ must have better security than we ever dreamed possible."

"The people of Culiacan, _señor_. They fought Marquez's army in the streets."

"Then they, too, are fools. Swayed by all that garbage rhetoric about Mexico and freedom." The man's eyes followed the flash of bird's wings among the trees. "Ungrateful. We have done much for them in the past." He smiled a little. "But they will pay. My father will see to it."

"_Señor,_" whispered the messenger. "_Está muerto también, señor_."

"I see." A pause. "¿_Y Eva_?"

"_Murió. Lo siento, señor._"

The man in the white suit stood very still. His eyes were hard. After a moment, he said evenly, "Is it known who has done this thing?"

"There are rumors, yes." The soldier hesitated. "But I do not think they can be true."

"What rumors, Miguel?" The three words were quiet, precisely enunciated, and sharp as knives.

Miguel licked his lips. "_El Mariachi_."

"A dead man," said his employer, thoughtfully.

"They say his gun shoots real bullets, _señor._ If it is true, he cannot be a ghost."

"No matter," answered the other. "Ghost or man, he is still dead."

"They say he had help," Miguel added. "From _el Pistolero Ciego._ The man who killed your sister."

"The blind gunman? Never heard of him." The man at the window laughed, softly. "But he is dead, also. He just doesn't know it yet."

His hand moved almost too quickly to be seen; the soldier flinched back, seeing the gun come up barely a second before the shot shattered the peaceful air of morning.

Outside, a scattering of leaves and bright feathers drifted to the earth. Felix Barillo leaned over the sill, and smiled when he caught sight of the little body struggling in the dust at the roots of the closest orange tree, its right wing a bloody ruin. He watched it for a minute or so, fascinated, listening to the creature's desperate, reedy cries.

"Maria?" he called. "Why don't you let the cat out, _querida mía_?" He turned back from the window, and looked at the trembling henchman with genuine surprise. "Miguel, _mi amigo._ You're still here?"

"I am gone, _señor_," Miguel gasped; and fled.

Barillo watched him go, and then crossed to the door, pushed the button on the intercom.

"¿_Sí, Felix?--¿Qué paso_?"

"Ramón," he said. "My father is dead. We must go to Sinaloa." He touched the medallion at his throat again, thinking of Eva Ajedrez Barillo. "And Ramón? Prepare for war."

* * *

**Aboard Aeromexico Flight #637  
****En route to Culiacan, Sinaloa  
****November 3rd, 2003**

"Damn you, Sands," Jules muttered. "Why couldn't you have screwed up in Turkey or fucking Myanmar or something? Why Mexico, for God's sake? We don't do _shit_ in Mexico."

_Correction. We didn't do shit, until he got there. And then it all hit the fan._

She frowned at the thick dossier open in front of her.

_Or did we?_

Something about these files was nagging at her. Something missing. Hollister had made it clear that she would be receiving information on a strictly need-to-know basis, which meant he was providing her with the minimum level of intelligence necessary for her to do her job. But that was routine. This...was different. And it tied in somehow with why Sands was down there making trouble in what she had always heard dismissed as a backwards and backwater country, a dreaded assignment, only minimally better than a desk job. Tied in with _El Presidente_ being targeted by both CIA and cartel.

If it had been Lebanon, or Turkey, or the Philippines, or any of a number of small South Asian nations, she would at least know the direction and strength of the currents that ran beneath the surface of events, unseen and uncomprehended by outsiders. But in Mexico she would be navigating strange, murky waters. And her map was incomplete.

She rubbed the bridge of her nose and closed her eyes briefly, turning her head from side to side to ease the crick in her neck.

God, how she hated working on planes. Even in first class, which at least offered the necessary privacy, she had no room to spread out, no surface to shuffle and reshuffle scraps of information until she saw the patterns fall into place. But today she had no choice. The twelve-hour-and-then-some flight, with stops, was all the time she had to achieve a working understanding of the peculiar circumstances, policies, and problems surrounding a country with which she had previously been only superficially familiar: the newly elected _presidente_ and his crime-fighting campaign, the cartels, of which there were anywhere between four and eight operating at any given time, the rot of corruption at the core of nearly every government agency, the nation's struggle to graduate from third-world country to major player in North American politics. It was a lot of information to assimilate in twelve hours; and, at the same time, not nearly enough.

And that was another thing that didn't quite feel right. She couldn't remember ever being sent to a brand new posting, even for a "get in, get out" mission like this one, with so little briefing and so little time to prepare. In fact, HQ had given her barely an hour this morning to pack her bags and say her hasty goodbyes, sparse as they were. She'd been informed that she'd be working with a small team in Culiacan, but that they would rendezvous with her on location. No specified names, no specified times, no specified meeting place. And that meant no guarantees. It probably also meant that the team in question had not yet been assembled, let alone contacted.

Either they trusted her implicitly, or the situation in Mexico had spun alarmingly out of control, and Sands was an even bigger risk than Hollister had implied.

Her money was on the latter.

She'd called her mother long-distance to San Diego before she left for the airport, told her she'd have to postpone her visit, told her she'd be out of touch for awhile again. There had been a long pause on the other end. "You work too much," said her mother, finally. "Government job...pah! Don't they know you have family? How you ever supposed to get married, living like this?" And she had lapsed into Vietnamese, the way she did when she was upset, and Jules had only partially understood the words. Something about lonely old mothers who hardly knew their own daughters. Jules pretended she didn't understand that part at all.

"It's all right, Ma," she had said, ignoring the guilt knotting in her gut that was the relic of another life, of a small, pigtailed girl well-versed in familial duty and the heavy shame of breaking a promise. "I like my job. Truly." This, she decided, was not the time to tell Phuong Cassidy that Gerald had broken off their engagement last week. ("It's like we don't even know each other anymore," he'd said earnestly, using the same phrase her mother might have used if she had spoken in English. "Every time you come home, it gets worse and worse. We're like strangers now, Julie. This isn't how it's supposed to be."

"I'm not a stranger, Gerry," she'd protested. "I know it's been a long time, but I'm still me. I'm still your Juliette."

"No, you're not," he said. "You're different. You've changed. And so have I...")

And he'd been right; they were both right, he and her mother, the people who should have known her best. They didn't know the real Jules Cassidy, any more than she knew the little girl who'd worn pigtails and her face. How could they? Her real life was elsewhere, a life they could never share in places she couldn't take them. Lived under a score of different names and identities, versions of her that they would never meet. By now, the Jules they thought they saw was just another mask, the one she happened to wear when she was undercover as a normal person with a normal life.

Hell, sometimes she wondered if she herself knew the real Jules, whether any of the masks were real.

"How long will it be this time?" her mother had asked, with a deep sigh that was designed to tighten the knot of guilt at Jules' core.

"I don't know," she said. The sigh had done its work; she said, "I'm really sorry, Ma. I'll try to visit as soon as I can, okay?"

"Okay, my daughter." Another gusty sigh. Mrs. Cassidy was merciless. "You travel safe, now. You don't go where there's fighting, right?"

"I'll be safe," Jules promised. "No war zones for me." _Not this time._

_Not officially, at least..._

She had hung up the phone, looked around her apartment at the empty walls, at the dead brown leaves of the plants that had gone unwatered for nine months, at Gerry's coat hanging from the back of a kitchen chair where he'd abandoned it in his haste to leave her, and the pang of conscience she had felt gave way easily to a fierce sense of relief.

She didn't live there; she just stayed there occasionally while on her way somewhere else. And she had short hair now. The pigtailed girl was lost to the past, where she belonged.

She hadn't cried when Gerry had told her it was over, though he had, to her dismay. She'd listened to his explanations and apologies as if from a significant distance, and when he was done, she'd stood up and asked him to leave. He'd stood there in her kitchen for a moment, eyes like a kicked puppy's as if she'd just dumped him instead of the other way around, and she had to say it again. "Gerry," she'd said evenly. "Get out, please. Now."

He'd taken a step back, then, and his expression changed. "Okay," he said, and there was something odd in his voice. "Okay, I'm going, Julie."

It was only after her front door slammed, leaving her alone, that she realized what she'd seen on his face. Fear. Despite her best efforts, she'd let the mask slip, and what he'd glimpsed there had scared him. And she hadn't even been thinking about hurting him.

Well. The thought of the illegal switchblade she kept among her steak knives _had_ crossed her mind. But she hadn't entertained it seriously.

Gerry didn't know what she really did in the Company, of course, though he had guessed that she was CIA a few months after they started dating. She had denied it, as she'd been trained to do, but he hadn't believed her; eventually she'd given up and related an extremely sanitized version of her job description.

"Have you ever killed anyone?" he'd asked then. They'd been in bed together, naked, lazy with a surfeit of sex; she'd been tracing patterns on his bare chest as she talked.

She'd laughed, and kissed him. "Of course not, silly," she said lightly. "You've been watching too many James Bond movies. Real spying isn't like that. A lot of paperwork, actually."

And it would have been true, if she were a regular case officer instead of black ops. She had kissed him again, gently to sweeten the lie, and then harder, to drive away the memory of death, its sound and sight and smell; touched him until her hands forgot the slippery warmth of blood.

That had been a long time ago. Since then, she'd stopped trying to forget; she found she'd remember at night anyway, vividly, in her dreams. And somewhere along the line, those things had ceased to be a source of horror to her. Sometimes a few people had to die for the good of the many, and it was her job to bring that about. And she was good at it. Sometimes she even enjoyed it—the risks, the challenges, the joy of the hunt, the elaborate traps she laid and sprang. It got messy occasionally, but that came with the territory.

Sands was good at it, too. And he had always enjoyed it, right from the start.

Jules thought about the Sands she had known. The mask she'd known. How she'd first met him, in CST orientation. He'd set himself apart from the rest of the group, lounging in a chair at the back of the room with a lazy, predatory grace, and winked at her when he caught her gaze, that smug smile playing around his mouth. A leer. She'd flipped him off and turned away, still feeling his dark eyes on her as a prickling at the back of her neck and down her spine, a sudden warmth pooling between her legs.

The second time they met, at one of the Company-organized mixers the new recruits were forced to attend, he'd patronized her. She detested him, but found herself watching him surreptitiously for the rest of the evening, until once again he'd caught her at it. His raised eyebrow had been a challenge and a proposition, and somehow baldly indecent. She'd fantasized about the sound of her fist connecting with one of those gorgeous cheekbones.

The third time they met, on their first day of combat training, she laid him out in front of their entire class. It was every bit as satisfying as she'd imagined. Her small frame and fine bone structure—product of her Irish-Vietnamese heritage—made her look delicate, and she knew how to use the illusion to her advantage. Like most men, he'd made the mistake of underestimating her.

He'd never made that mistake again. Nor had any of the other guys in the class.

After that, it had been war. She made top marks at the Farm because of Sheldon Sands; they both had, trying constantly to best one another. He played dirty, but she learned fast. Their rivalry had been bitter and dead-serious, and much talked-of among the rest of the Clandestine Service Trainees, who laid bets on who would come out on top each week.

What the rest of the class hadn't known was that the fourth time they'd met, they ended up fucking on the training room floor.

She had been on top, that time.

They had kept their sexual relationship as private as their rivalry was public, and laughed when they heard that another pool had been started, this time for wagers on when they would finally "get it over with and get it on already." Relationship, she called it, for there was nothing of romance in what they were, what they did, their couplings often as violent and antagonistic as their competition in the field. He scared the shit out of her, and pissed her off, and fascinated her. He could be very charming when he wanted to be—like a snake, she had told herself, even as she let herself be drawn in by the silky voice and the dark, magnetic gaze. He was danger, adrenaline, mystery. Intoxicating.

Hollister had called them lovers. Had she loved Sands? He had not, she knew, loved her. She didn't think he could; he had no more use for love than he did for compassion. But he had known her, known the secret parts of her, the darkness they shared that no one else recognized or understood.

He had seen the real Jules Cassidy; though she had never been quite sure how much of the Sands she saw was real.

No, not love, she decided. More like addiction. Sands had been a drug to her veins, a rush that she had always known, somewhere in the back of her mind, to be deadly. As he almost had been...

Not lovers, but they'd been partners. In their last weeks at the farm, during covert ops training, they'd been paired up together. They'd practiced setting traps together. Shared the thrill of the hunt. She'd made a mistake, then. She let herself trust him. Believed she knew him, believed she saw beneath the mask.

And in the end, he'd almost killed her.

She stirred, dragging her attention back to the cramped type of the page before her.

Now, she would be laying a trap for him. Hunting the hunter. The ultimate challenge.

_If he is alive, that is._

_If he's dead, I get to finish my vacation…_

She hoped he was alive. Somehow, though, she doubted he was dead.

Sands was like her, in that way. A killer, yes.

But also a survivor.


End file.
